I rise in support of the Government amendment and in support of the ambition of the policy of creating a million Welsh speakers. I applaud the ambition, in particular, of the Welsh Government’s policy, and we should be under no illusion about what a radical policy this is. We’ve had a decline in the Welsh language for a century or more, and we are proposing, within the next 30 years, not only to stop that decline but to reverse it—to double the number of Welsh speakers within the context of international trends that make this extremely tricky. So, let us be under no illusions about how difficult this is.

The members of the Assembly’s Culture, Welsh Language and Communities Committee have been carefully looking at the evidence, now, for a number of months, and the challenges before us are stark. One piece of evidence—we don’t have official Government figures on this yet—we did receive suggests that we need to create an additional 9,000 Welsh speakers every year between now and 2050 to meet this commitment—9,000 additional Welsh speakers. This is a significant challenge when you bear in mind that only about 30 per cent—